As he ran a hand up the hem of my dress, a bird fluttered to life in the trees to our left. Gable snapped his head toward the noise. Unwilling to leave the calming feeling he’d given me, I kissed his pulsing throat. He smelled of man, leather and his wolf. My wolf. His throat moved under my lips as he swallowed.
“I have to keep my head out here, and this,” he gripped my wrists and gently pushed me back. “This ain’t helping.”
Torn between the want to be close to him for what could be our last time, and to let him keep his focus so we could live to be close another day, I dropped my face. “I’m sorry.”
“Woman, don’t you ever apologize for that.” He poured the steaming meal into two bowls and handed me one. “Eat. You need your strength. There’s no way to know if he’ll come tonight or two days from now. Or ever.”
My shoulders shook with a sudden chill. “He’s coming, Gable. I can feel it.”
The hardness of his lupine eyes softened. “When we get home, and the crops have come in, and the cattle are sold, I’m going to buy you oil paints in every color imaginable. I’ll give you brushes of every shape and size and canvases to paint on. You’ll paint a picture of the Dawson woods and we’ll hang it above the hearth of our home.”
I relaxed into the story and drifted away on his imaginings.
“I’ll carve you a dressing table to brush your hair by before you come to bed with me, and build you a fire in the stones of our hearth every cold night. And I’ll fix all the things about myself that were broken before you came along. These are promises, Luc.”
“I’m just scared,” I whispered. I leaned my forehead against his. “I have too much to live for now.”
“I…” He froze like he’d been struck. “They’re coming.”
I squeaked out, “They?”
“He’s brought others. Four men. Six rounds in a gun, Luc. He bolted from the clearing in a move so fast he blurred. “Remember,” the trees seemed to whisper.
I listened for the echoing crack of his change but could hear nothing over my thrashing heart. Buhbum, buhbum, buhbum—like a death chant.
I took a long draw of cold mountain air and held my breath. In the flames, I found my strength. I let the last memories of Mother and Father wash over me like an avalanche. I remembered the pain of Bryant’s tiny, frail body going limp in my arms. Ralston had taken everything from me and still, it wasn’t enough for him. He was here to kill me and he wouldn’t be satisfied with a clean death. The drumming pulse of fury replaced my frightened rabbit’s heartbeat.
He was here to kill me, but I’d repay him in kind.
I turned my back to the horses and put my long, white hair on display. It swayed in the wind and tickled my cheeks. Be brave, the wind whispered, and a vengeful calm filled me.
Ralston may have thought he knew me in England, but he certainly didn’t know me now. He’d forced an iron strength into my blood and bones. I was a woman who survived massacres and pirate ships. I was a woman who ran with wolves and commanded the love of the fiercest animal. I’d taken council with two women who’d refused to give up and fed only on their bond to the ones they loved. I wasn’t Lucianna Whitlock any longer. I was a Dawson.
I’d carefully cleaned my plate and wiped my mouth by the time careful horses’ hooves clomped through the tree line. I sat straight and still until the moment the pistol clicked and the cold metal of the barrel sifted through my loose hair and touched the skin of my scalp.
“Lucianna,” Ralston said with the voice of a snake. “You’ve led me on a delicious chase.”
At the sound of his voice I smiled slightly into the flames before me. He’d come. His first act of bravery would be his last.
My voice shook just enough from the rushing energy that pumped just under my skin’s surface. “My man will be back at any moment. Leave if you know what’s best for you.”
“Find him and kill him,” Ralston demanded. Four sets of boots crunched off for the woods. “Very clever of you to run away with a mountain man.” He sat beside me and looked around the clearing with that hollow, emotionless gaze of his. “I would’ve never thought to look for you here. You could’ve lived forever up here if you had any loyalty from the townspeople below.” He stomped snow from the tip of his black, shiny boot. “I’m probably doing you a favor.”
I let what I hoped was fear slither into my eyes. “Why couldn’t you just let me go?”
“Do you know the merger with your father’s companies would’ve made history? Do you know how much wealth would’ve trickled through our family? Our grandchildren’s grandchildren wouldn’t work a day in their lives and still would’ve wanted for nothing. Every eligible lady in London was slathering for a proposal from me but you.” His voice turned hard and poisonous. “You, who were the most beautiful, the most sought after, with the ripest body to torture for my pleasure. I had to have you, Lucianna. If I can’t, no one can. And now a filthy mountain man has caught your fancy. Do you know how insulting that is to me?” He wrapped his hands around my throat and tightened his grip until I was gasping. “Do you?” he roared.
The barely held together facade was just that. He’d slipped in the months since I’d seen him. He’d always been missing something, but the hunt for me had done irreparable damage to the man.
I clawed at his tightening grip. “Please,” I gasped. “You’ve already killed my family. Don’t hurt Gable.”
His grip loosened just enough for me to drag a few air molecules into my suffocating lungs. He brought his smile to my lips and kissed me. Cold fingers of skittering chills scratched down my spine as his emotionless lips touched mine. “It’s what I do, Lucianna. I couldn’t just crush you. I had to destroy you. No one crosses a Bastrop, remember?”
The death sigh of a man sounded through the woods. Ralston jerked his attention away from me and frowned into the shadow-laden forest. “Azle? Brackeen?”
A movement drifted through the woods like a phantom and he twitched toward it. Slowly he stood and yelled louder, “Moritz?”
I gasped and filled my lungs with the absence of his crushing hand. His pistol found my forehead unsteadily before he pointed it toward the woods. A black wolf slunk just behind the shadows. Its eyes glowed in the reflection of the firelight. Ralston fired a shot but the wolf was already gone.
One.
“You’re an intelligent man, Ralston,” I said in a tone as steady as April rain. “That voice in your head telling you something’s gone wrong is correct. Cry for your men to protect you all you want, but unless you have the ability to speak to the dead, they won’t answer you back.”
A gray wolf weaved through the trees only to disappear as soon as Ralston pulled the trigger.
Two.
Three.
His voice held the slightest tremor. “What is this?” His gun swung for another movement but it was gone. The metal of the gun rattled in the palm of his trembling hand.
“Did you know there used to be thousands of wolves here? They’ve been hunted until only a few hundred remain but they still thrive where humans won’t brave a living. Like in these mountains.”
“Shut up.” His gun swung for me. “Shut up!”
A snarl sounded behind him and the whites of his eyes shone all around the dead blue.
He turned slowly to find my white wolf with bared fangs just beyond the tree line. He bolted for the shadows as Ralston aimed.
Four.
Five.
I clenched my hands against the urge to pull my knife and gut him for shooting at Gable. We had to follow the plan or I wouldn’t keep the life I wanted.
Three wolves, larger and faster than possible, weaved through the trees. Closer and closer they came until Ralston screamed in frustration and took a shot. Powdered snow flew up where he missed, and the white wolf disappeared once again.
Six.
He pulled the pistol back to me and I challenged his empty gaze with my own. “If you kill me, you won’t survive.”
A
cruel and twisted smile seized his face. It was easy to see it. I hadn’t ever been able to put my finger on what was off with Ralston Bastrop, but here, in the deep recesses of a mountain night, I realized what was missing. His soul.
“You’re right. I wouldn’t survive without you.” He latched onto the back of my hair and shoved me toward the snarling, snapping wolves.
One gray and one black beast stood on either side of me, but instead of attacking, they lifted their cold, feral gazes slowly to him. They waited as I stood and dusted my dress off. Ralston’s gun pointed from the wolves to me and back, and as one, we stalked toward him. The firelight was warm against my face and though Ralston’s was immersed in shadow, I could see fear in his eyes for just an instant before he aimed the gun at my head and pulled the trigger.
Click.
Click.
Click, click, click.
“Boo!” I said as the white wolf lunged from the shadows into the side of my tormentor.
A noise long and loud and bloated with terror screeched from Ralston’s throat.
Gable loped off for the woods and was followed by the others.
“You’re a witch,” Ralston accused between gasps. “You control them because you cast black magic here. Sss,” he hissed between his teeth. “It’s burning.”
His hand bled freely and was already swelling. I searched for any other weapons on him and tossed a knife from his pocket into a drift of snow.
“You should probably watch that. Blood poisoning runs rampant out here.”
His shaking hand was cradled against his chest. “What’ve you done to me?”
“I haven’t done anything to you. The consequences of your actions are yours alone.”
Within minutes he was rolling in the snow and groaning about the pain. I’d pity the man if he hadn’t just tried to feed me to the wolves. Sheriff Hawkins and Elias sauntered into the clearing and put him in chains while I packed camp. We hadn’t discussed this far into our plan, but I sure as bloody hell wasn’t staying the night in the forest with my almost murderer in custody. He belonged in a cage.
Gable and his brothers remained wolves. We didn’t need Ralston screaming werewolf and his mind hadn’t made a connection so far. He rambled on and on about how I trained the wolves to trap him. Sheriff Hawkins dragged him down the mountain on Jeremiah’s horse, and Elias pulled the two rider-less mounts behind him. I followed them, never taking my eyes from Ralston. By the time we dragged him groaning and sweating into the jail house in town, his bitten hand had turned a dark and unhealthy color.
Sheriff Hawkins wrote a formal report of the events—minus the werewolves—that had taken place tonight and credited Ralston’s lackey’s deaths as kills by him and Elias under the authority of the law. It was the middle of the night and time was of the essence, so the sheriff woke up a man named Thomas Harbringer to open the post office and send a telegram to Denver, absolving me from the crime my wanted poster accused me of. I’d still have to go to trial, but reliable, law-abiding witnesses would attest to my innocence.
“I’m supposed to tell you not to leave town,” Sheriff Hawkins said with a wink as I left.
I turned at the door. “I’m finished running.” I was going to bake he and Elias strawberry pies as soon as I learned how to make them for all they’d done. They’d probably never even know the gift they’d given with their help.
I took a deep draw of crisp air as I closed the door behind me. For the first time in a long time, I wasn’t afraid.
Gable waited patiently in front of the jailhouse, and stood slowly as I approached. “Is it done?”
“Sheriff thinks the trial will be short.” I wanted to cry tears of joy, but overwhelmed, I swallowed my emotions down. “Soon, this will all be behind us.”
Gable crushed me to him and rocked gently back and forth, like an intimate dance. “Are you okay? I wanted to kill that bastard when he strangled you. Tell me you’re all right.”
“I’m fine. Just shaky and tired. Gable?”
“Hmm?” he asked in a delicious rumble against my neck.
“Can we sleep in our house tonight?”
He tilted his head toward the pink streaks on the horizon. “It ain’t nighttime anymore.”
When he smiled at me like this, it made all of my hurts disappear. I didn’t know where they’d gone. I searched the darkest crevices of my heart, but they simply didn’t exist anymore in these moments between us. Somewhere over the past months with him, Gable had healed me.
I rested my cheek against the steady rhythm of his heartbeat. “Take me home.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Gable
“Why do people call you The Gable?” Lucianna asked in a soft voice. She looked uncomfortable with the question, like it was something she’d been wanting to ask for a long time but didn’t know how to.
I set my bucket of whitewash down and leaned against the unpainted door frame. She stroked her white-tipped, horsehair brush carefully around the front window.
“The Battle of Glorieta Pass was the first time I ever fought for the Union. Colorado was split between the Federal Army and the Confederates and it served as an important supply line. The land in the Colorado territory is also rich with silver and gold mines and both sides needed them to finance the war. The base of the Rockies was where the Confederates were making a big move to push the Union out. A couple days before the all-out battle, some of us had skirmishes with a few of the confederates. Now, we’d been training and I’d already proved I could wield a pistol, sword, and musket and I was uncanny quick, so our commanding officer said, send in The Gable, like I was more a weapon than a man. He’d said it offhand, but the name stuck as I survived the front lines of a battle we weren’t supposed to win.”
“Is that where you got the scars?”
“That’s the place. I wasn’t supposed to live. They’d shoved us in rows, the injured, and the field docs passed over the ones they thought were too far gone in order to give their services to the ones they could save. Doctor came to me and barely looked at my injuries before he moved on. A young boy was assisting him, and I remember he was white as a sheet at all the bad stuff he’d seen that day. Men were screaming, dying, and he was just a kid. Here, sir, he said to me. He handed me a dirty rag and told me to press it on my wound. Doc yelled at him to hurry on to the next one, but it was a kindness that stuck with me. I heal quickly thanks to what I am, but it was a significant injury and I got the fever the second day. I lived, but even if it was just barely, I’d been written off and some of the men I’d fought with called me The Gable, like before the fight. Like I was a machine instead of a man. Word spread of the battle and at every one I fought from then on out, my nickname preceded me. Soldiers thought I could do the impossible in a fight because I’d fought so many front lines and lived. Sometimes we did the impossible. The name stuck. The reputation that came with the name brought me more bloodshed than I should’ve seen. It killed more at the hand of my sword and musket.” This was the first time I’d talked about any of it, and I shrugged to try and ease the tension in my shoulders.
Lucianna reached out in that soothing way of hers and touched the rough skin of my face. “If you weren’t The Gable, you would’ve never saved me that night in the fog.”
A warmth spread though me that I was helpless to stop. She was right, and it was the first time I’d ever found a benefit to what I’d gone through. I had my reasons for leaving for a war my small town didn’t have much use for. The cause didn’t prevent the damage years of war, soldiering, and killing pressed against my wolf like an inescapable weight. But if the destruction had never been done, I wouldn’t be in those woods that night to save her. I wouldn’t have been running from my demons and right into the arms of Lucianna.
I leaned forward and drank in the sweetness of her inviting lips. She couldn’t even know what she’d done for me. The man in me had abandoned this world, and she’d pulled him away from the jaws of my wolf and gave me balance. I st
ill had to change more often than was right, but I’d get better with her around. I knew I would. She was a damned good reason to be a better man.
Her lips, the soft pink of the morning sky, smiled as I pulled away.
A part of me felt him before any of my senses even whispered a warning. I turned to the silent Indian who sat on a dark pony on the edge of the woods. Luke and Jeremiah appeared around the side of the house in that uncanny way of theirs.
“Who is he?” Lucianna asked.
I could hear her racing heartbeat clear as day, so I squeezed her hand in an attempt to comfort her. “Stay here.”
She stood stoically on the porch as I stepped in front of the house. I recognized Oupita’s man, but he looked different now. His hair had been cut short as the Ute often did when they were mourning the death of someone they loved.
It was hard to swallow and a dread I was powerless against filled me until I thought the black roiling tendrils of it would surely escape me. Ute didn’t cut their hair lightly.
He nudged his horse and approached slowly. His greeting was stern and his eyes held the rigidity of stone. In the tongue of his people, he said, “I see you. You’ve been a spirit in the shadows since the day I took Oupita as my woman. I now have a daughter.”
“And Oupita?”
He shook his head slowly back and forth. He turned the horse and revealed the boy clinging to his back. “He belongs with his people.”
The boy squeezed his eyes at the words that came from the man who’d taken him into his tipi without a care that he wasn’t his own. A single tear ran down the boy’s face and my heart broke apart. What chance would a half-Indian boy have outside of his tribe?
“You are his people.” The words tore from me as if they took a piece of my flesh with them.
“He is Mahtuhgurch Sahdteech. What can a man teach a wolf he’s caged? He can’t grow into what he’s supposed to be on a reservation.” He switched to a slow, deliberate English tongue. “He is blood of my heart, but he is not blood of my blood.”